Long time no diary. It seems my diary is turning into a
mensary. I don't
know if that's a real world, but a log that's updated about
once a month
could probably be called something like that.

Sketch

I've created a new Sketch mailing list at SourceForge
because the old
mailing list which was run by Olof Kylander at Frozenriver
was down. In
fact all frozenriver servers seem to be down. Nobody seems
to know what
happened to Olof and Karin and Frozenriver. I heard some
rumours from a
Gimp developer, but no real information.

Fortunately the transition went quite smoothly. As luck
would have it
I had a quite recent list of subscribers of he old list, so
I didn't
have to start from scratch again.

On the development side, the next stable version will be
released
tomorrow, hopefully. It would be mostly a bugfix release
with only a few
minor new features if it weren't for a slightly improved SVG
export
filter (it handles some gradients now) and especially the
new PDF export
filter. Thanks to ReportLab, I
was able to implement it with just about 300 lines of
application
specific code.

I've also started hacking on a PDF import filter for
Sketch. It
already works to some degree on the PDF files generated by
reportlab,
but its overall desing is still in its early stages and it
will take
some more iterations before I feel I can let it loose on the
public by
checking it into CVS.

Reading

I've been rereading parts of Goethe's <it>Faust</it> in
recent weeks.
I read it for the first time after I had seen the
Gründgens Film in
a cinema in Göttingen in IIRC, 1990 or 1991.

I'm not sure whether it's good or bad that we didn't read
<it>Faust</it> in
school. I mean, I would probably have liked it much more
than
<it>Iphigenie</it>, but OTOH, having to read
something takes
away some of the fun of reading.

Anyway, <it>Faust I</it> is probably the most often
quoted piece of
German literature. Some cool quotes: